The adjective ‘creative’ and the abstract noun ‘creativity’ have been on a wild ride just lately. Where once they referred almost exclusively to artistic practice, in recent times they have become the buzzwords of new capitalism. There is hardly a corporate vision statement, a ‘master plan for restructuring’, or job advertisement that does not refer to creativity. Additionally, it has become a lifestyle zeitgeist in an era of increasingly precarious employment. The shelves of bookshops in hipster neighbourhoods are littered with self-help and career-advice books with creativity in the title (Barton, 2016; de Bono, 2015; Ingeldew, 2016; Judkins, 2016): Liberate your creative instincts! Take control of your life! A word that once signified independent self-expression has now become both a motto of neo-liberalism and a panacea for its consequences.

In one sense, there is nothing remarkable about this semantic slippage. Language is never fixed; all words change meaning through use. But this particular transition is historically important: it is symptomatic of capitalism's epochal quest to reorganize relations of production and reconstruct labour power. However, as we argued, the brave new world of the creative economy is as yet more planned than realized. Its proponents point to digital renewal, and in particular the success of Silicon Valley ‘unicorns’ like Apple, Google, Amazon. But there is little evidence of widespread social benefits from the tech boom. The core creative workforces employed by such companies are very small when compared with the numbers employed by Fordist enterprises in the mid-twentieth century. So without widespread reasonably paid creative employment it is difficult to argue that the benefits of the sort of economic restructuring craved by policymakers will flow to workers.

The quest to marry art and economy is formidable. In bridging the void that separates the old and new economies, employers and policymakers face the problem of how to conscript cultural energies and practices that, as Bruno Gulli (2005) has argued, were traditionally situated outside the wage relation. Creativity is not easily summoned up by strict managerial direction. How does capitalism harness workers’ ludic and imaginative impulses, and their intellectual curiosity, to the project of building the new economy?